Quick Links

Club PA 2.0 has arrived! If you'd like to access some extra PA content and help support the forums, check it out at patreon.com/ClubPA

The image size limit has been raised to 1mb! Anything larger than that should be linked to. This is a HARD limit, please do not abuse it.

Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.

Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!

They advanced the PLOT?! Warhammer 40k casual lore

Roboute Guilliman is not only back, and leading a new mega crusade for the Imperium? When the hell did this happen? Why is everything so cool? How will this eventually go grimdark? And please lore nerds get me back up to speed with what's actually happening to the different 40k races in the most recent "current" 41st-42nd millennium story line. Because I haven't been this hyped since Dawn of War II hit.

So I may have made it through the first...15 books of horus heresy because of the humble bundle. I actually really liked Dan Abnetts stuff (about the IG interacting with the Alpha legion, and the remembrancer leeman russ's fenrisians took in) Any other recommendations? I'm curious about the salamanders and the iron whatevers, but honestly I don't need another book of glistening muscles and shootybangs. I really appreciated the later books that had a point, even if it was a simple one like "the unrestrained quest for knowledge may lead you bad places" or "those savages might not be so savage"

There was a emperor and he was cool and shit until half of his weird clone sons betrayed him. He won but he now has to be on assisted living and is hooked up to some kind of iron lung that runs on human souls. Also people worship him as a god now even though he didn't want to be and now humanity is basically the medieval Catholic church on steroids.

Within the Imperium there's the Space Marines, who are basically genetically modified with these sons' genes or some shit. They have like 15 hearts and are super soldiers. Then there's the Imperial Guard, who are just normal humans. There's a LOT of them, and they're mostly fodder, either choking the enemy on their dead or lasting long enough for tanks and artillery to blow them the fuck up. Last (not really last, but the Imperium has like 500 sub-factions) there's the Sisters of Battle because 40k is a nerd hobby so of course girls couldn't be Space Marines and needed their own army. They're basically the Church's personal army, created via a loophole saying the church could have no MEN of arms could be under the church after a spat it had with other factions within the Imperium. So they're basically augmented nuns with flamethrowers.

There are orks who live to just fight and care about nothing else. They grow via spores and thus are hard to eliminate fully, their machines work simply through belief, and the only thing preventing them from taking over the galaxy is that they love fighting each other just as much as anyone else.

The clone sons that betrayed their dad fucked off into another dimension and worship some fucked up gods. Every so often they go back home to fuck people's shit up and be jerks. Faction of maybe one of the best guys in the franchise. He's a swell dude.

The fucked up gods have their own army that's a colorful cast of demons. They want to kill most everything, and that's honestly all you need to know about MOST armies in Warhammer 40k.

Eldar are basically space elves whom have been around forever. They created one of the aforementioned fucked-up gods when their society entered a golden age and they spent all day getting high and having orgies. yes, they created a literal god through shear force of fucking. Now there's two factions, regular prudish eldar who denounce the old ways, and dark eldar who are serious kinksters that raid locations for more drugs and possibly slaves.

Necrons are an even older race that had short life spans. They turned to some other ancient entity that said it would make a deal with them in exchange for extending their lives. Because that always works out. Now they're encased in robotic bodies and basically slaves with the goal of wiping out all life in the galaxy. Now they're buried in various places and notoriously hard to kill.

Tau are a young race and basically space communists if written by a capitalist. They're also pretty anime but instead of gunpla they just build their own mechs. They have a shitty caste system, enforce sterilization on outside races they're allied with, and have a diplomatic policy of "join us or die." A willingness to work with other races in any capacity makes them one of the nicest factions in the setting.

Tyranids are space bugs from a neighboring galaxy. They want to eat everything and basically jump from planet to planet harvesting every scrap of usable material from it, leaving cold dead husks. They're very adaptable despite having no discernable technology, and there's no telling how many of them there truly are.

Squats do not exist, never existed, and I'm not even sure why I brought them up here.

There's also a group of genetically engineered, cybernetic power armor enhanced Space Marines who are semi-permanently stuck in space-hell, and randomly appear to slaughter the enemies of man before disappearing like ghosts, and they are skeletons and also on fire.

40k lore justifies its constant retcons and inconsistencies sorta like The Elder Scrolls does, in that everything is gleaned from an ever shifting mass of in-universe literature and histories that are not to be taken at face value

the "Orks believe their machines work, so they do" thing might be real psychic enhancements to cobbled together machines, or it might be that Imperial scientists studying Ork tech only ever get it in beaten up and malfunctioning condition. who knows?

the series used this to its advantage in recharacterizing the Necrons from non-descript terminator robots that would randomly pop in and out of Imperial space, into an outright ancient alien race of competing Egyptian-esque warlords

Hmm, so after some reading it seems like this is a pretty good shake up. The Imperium has been split in half due to a warp rift, but it's also rallying behind some effective leadership. I'm pretty excited to see how this plays out.

More seriously, the lack of Lizardmen and Skaven equivalents in 40K always makes me sad. Especially as the Lizardmen already have some crazy future tech as essentially ancient artifacts. Like Kroq-gar's laser hand. I might be running Black Crusade soon and I personally plan to shove in future lizardmen as antagonists at some point.

Really if it's because we got a better Gw think it's acceptable
To know in the space of a year it went from this

To this

To this
Really I had no idea how to paint necron vehicles I thought it was a dark green and a ton of wash
Their facebook plays along with people
I like watching Duncan the robot paint as it solves a lot of problems and questions I had about certain looks or had no idea how they got that look

Basically if you want some fun in your grimdark check out nurgle and tzeentch daemons.

I love the lore for the latter tzeentch daemons. One can write any spell but can't actually read, while the other can read it out to cast it but has no idea what it says. So it could be wildly destructive, or make a pile of feathers twitch. Like a magic sitcom couple.